Work Text:
Hibbert Lumber didn’t have a bell over the door. It didn’t have an entryway to the sewers or anything mystical or mysterious or supernatural on its shelves. It was a one-story wooden block of a building at the corner of Fifth and G, across the street from the 76 gas station and three blocks away from Baskin Robbins. It sold screws, hammers, joints, nails, dowels, wrenches, light bulbs, brooms, little bits of metal and large pieces of wood, tools to work the metal and wood, wires, hatchets, nuts, bolts, paint, pipes, rakes, and every and all manner of wares that were hard.
It was the least magical-feeling place Buffy had stood for a good, long time. The smell – not sweet, not unpleasant – was all faded wood and fresh metal. The exposed ceiling joists and unpainted beams gave her eyes something to catch and hold. Everything organized, nothing haphazard or arbitrary. It was a place of business. The business of putting things together and fixing them.
“I worked here a few months, after the pizza but before the ice cream,” Xander said. “I still use them a lot. You ever need some duct tape, a tape measure, some glue, and a dozen feet of kiln-dried vertical grain Douglas fir, they’ve got you covered.”
“And if you need a job?” Buffy asked, trying not to feel nervous.
“Oh, they got those too,” he said. “As long as you ask really, really nicely and know the secret password.”
“Swordfish?”
“OSHA compliant,” he said, and introduced her to the manager, Rebecca, oldest daughter of the original owners and working to keep the family business in the family.
“Do you have retail experience?” she asked.
“Not much,” Buffy admitted, not wanting to get into the Magic Box or Doublemeat. “Most of my experience is in food service. Waitressing. I worked at a restaurant in Los Angeles, so I know unruly customers. Helen’s Kitchen. You know it?” Rebecca shook her head. “Right. I don’t think it’s in the Zagat’s guide. But, as I was saying, I know how to talk to customers, especially customers who want something you don’t have to give them, and before I left, I trained on the register. Cashier balancing and emptying the till at the end of the day. I can do that for you, if you need me to.”
Rebecca nodded. “Can you start tomorrow?”
“Can I? I mean, can I ever. Yes. What time?”
“How’s one o’clock work for you?”
“That works out nicely,” she said. “Great, even! What should – I mean, is there a dress code?”
“Machine washable,” Rebecca told her. “Just in case. You’ll get a staff apron, but besides that, clean, nice. T-shirts are fine. No graphics or bands, but plain colors, they’re okay. Long pants, no shorts. Jeans, if they’re not ripped or stained. Keep your hair tied back, a braid or a bun or a ponytail. That sort of thing.” Buffy nodded. “Good. Let’s give you the tour.”
The tour mostly consisted of which aisles had which wares for which parts of the house and what was around the lumber yard and where to park her bike around back, away from the customer rack. And the location of office and the break room in the little house next door and how to work the coffee pot. Ordinary, usual stuff for an ordinary, usual job. It ended with a Hibbert Lumber employee handbook that explained things like workers’ comp and direct deposit.
“You seem like a smart cookie,” Rebecca said. “You sound like you want this. And I know Xander. If he’s vouching for you, I’ll trust his judgment.” Behind her back, Xander preened. “But this is still a business. It works out tomorrow, we’ll bring you on. I want to make sure you know we can’t offer you full time right now.”
“I can do part-time,” Buffy told her. “Part-time’s what I can do right now.”
“Then we’re settled.” Rebecca smiled. “See you tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeping in their petty pace for three six-hour shifts a week, noon to closing, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Not a lot of income. But it was a job to go to and a place to be. And it’d give her enough for what she wanted.
-
After it was over – after Willow was back to herself, but before she and Giles left for England – Giles and Buffy had sat down and talked in a way they hadn’t since before she’d died. It was a talk they should’ve had months earlier, a talk neither of them could’ve had back then. And they were too happy to finally be having the talk that they didn’t want to think about why it’d felt so impossible. Better just to have the talk. Better to figure out what to do going forward.
Eight hundred dollars deposited in Buffy’s checking account on the first of the month was enough to see to the usual bills, most incidental costs, an occasional indulgent pastry. Enough to keep her and Dawn on their feet without drawing attention, not enough for more than a few little luxuries here and there.
It wasn’t all that little, the luxury that Buffy wanted. There was one big up-front payment, and the rest – there wasn’t a price that could be put to that.
-
The studio smelled clean. Not sterile, but hard clean, like dirt after rain. Like a room that’d been scrubbed down fiercely and left to dry. There was an upbeat funk hanging on every surface. Nothing gleamed or shone. All the studio’s stuff was put away, but none of it was put away neatly. There weren’t chairs, just tall stools, and Buffy couldn’t figure out why she was surprised by that.
Ten weeks, two hours each Friday, 7 to 9 p.m. Sixty dollars for non-student registration, plus a fifteen-dollar material deposit fee, proof of address and a few signatures on a couple forms. Her mother’s fondest dream of seeing Buffy take an art class and her ancient fear of seeing her daughter attend summer school both coming to pass at the same time.
UC Sunnydale was strict in its core requirements, but flexible as to how they could be fulfilled. If she’d managed to stay in school – and that was all it was, if she’d stayed, she could let herself think about if – there would’ve been a wide range of possibilities for her fine arts credits. Photography. Acting. Figure drawing. Watercolor painting. Woodworking. Metalworking. Bookbinding.
Ceramics and pottery.
Ten weeks, two hours each Friday working clay under her hands and between her fingers. She wasn’t the only non-traditional student in the class; she wasn’t the oldest person in the room and she wasn’t the youngest. Only their teacher, a tall, solid Black woman in her sixties named Nidia, had done this before. Everyone was just beginning. Buffy fit in because there wasn’t any way for her to stand out.
Clay caught underneath her fingernails and on the back of her wrists, and she knew she’d had to wait until the end of class to wash it off. Leaning over the slip barrel, the smell of the watery clay threw her back into her grave, and she lost twenty minutes of class standing outside staring up at the sunset sky, shivering and sick, clenching her hands and trying to breathe, until she could tell herself where she was in the world and believe it.
Back into the classroom, she dabbed water gently onto her work, then smashed it into one giant blob and started again. Because she could do that, with clay. Because that was what their teacher told them. If she messed up, she could smush the whole thing and start over. As long as she didn’t let herself get caught up in the smushing. Because, with ceramics, she had to finish. That was the rule. That was Nidia’s biggest rule. Get some time with clay in your hands. Figure out how it feels between your fingers, and how hard you have to press to smooth it out, and how far you can roll it until it breaks. Then make something. They’d learn glazing and the wheel and all that fancy stuff in time, after they made something.
It didn’t matter how good or how bad it was. You just had to finish it.
The girl to her right ended the first sculpting session with a vase she’d coil-built and smoothed out to look like a Coke bottle. Buffy, and the woman on her left, had gone with pinching. They’d made bowls, round and simple, not fancy and not trying to be. Buffy mostly used the bowl to figure out how to listen to her fingertips: when the clay felt stiff or dry, when to add a little water, when to work over another section.
Near the end of class, a few minutes at the wheel taught her she wasn’t supernaturally gifted with the art form.
Which, honestly, was a good lesson to learn.
She could center the clay on the wheel, she could work it gently on the table, she could haul around the slip barrel by herself, and she could come to class ready to learn. She was better than a couple of people and not as good as a bunch of others. She didn’t stand out because she fit in.
-
Class ended between twilight and nighttime, when things moved from crepuscular to nocturnal. Most students biked or drove to class – the studio all the way out at the far edge of campus, past the quad and the library and the science labs and way out past the football field and parking lots. It was a long walk to and from Revello Drive.
Buffy was good at walking.
Up an alley, down a street, through the gate and across the cemetery. Rounding the mausoleums, nodding at the columbariums with their tasteful benches. Keeping an eye out for movement, always paying attention to the hair on the back of her neck, knowing it wasn’t ever nothing. It was never nothing.
But there were good nights too. When something was a gentle breeze or the movement was a hare dashing across the street towards a burrow hidden in the tall grass. Sometimes it was a vampire; other times it was a murder of crows flying home for the night.
Nothing to keep her company. Nothing to ask her how she was doing, to make a joke, to give her a hand. Nothing to get on her nerves; nothing to soothe them.
Nothing she couldn’t handle.
But she didn’t know how to handle nothing.
-
Most nights she slept fine. Most mornings she woke up not wanting to go back to sleep. Most days didn’t have much in them. But, even in a day without much, there was still plenty to do.
Three days a week she biked to work and ate her lunch in the break room before sitting herself down at the counter to sell copper wire and wood varnish. There was always something to do in retail: taking phone orders, restocking the nail bins and screw containers, hauling lumber across the yard while lifting with her knees and wearing her safety gloves. There were customers who knew exactly what they wanted, customers who didn’t know how to ask for what they needed, customers who wanted to stare at everything arranged neatly and leave without buying anything, customers who wanted to be angry at someone – and couldn’t hold a candle to giant snake demons and hell gods and dying – and eventually left after they tired themselves out. Buffy wasn’t sad to see them go.
Sometimes, things were slow enough she could pull out a book and read uninterrupted for eight full minutes at a stretch. So long as she put her book away the moment someone needed her, Rebecca was fine with it coming back out when the moment was over.
Books from Mom’s room, travel memoirs by people who’d gone to strange and wonderful places and lived to come back and tell their stories. Tales of cities and Tales of the City. Fun and breezy novels with beach chairs and green hills on the covers where everyone got what they needed and sometimes what they wanted, too. Books that never talked about the world that existed, not even a moment with a guy in the back maybe looking a little strange in the right light. Nothing lurking in the shadows or hiding in the dark.
Books Dawn was happy to lend to her: kids running away from home to hide out in museums or surviving the perils of summer camp or taking on the Canadian wilderness and fighting it to a standstill. Books she’d picked up her last semester of college and never gotten around to reading: used copies of short story and poetry collections that hadn’t been worth returning to the campus bookstore for a couple dollars of store credit.
Books she’d found in a crypt. Not that many. None of them anywhere close to new; all of them smelling strongly of cold dirt and faintly of old ash, creased and yellowed and stained. No connection between them she could see, just a bunch of books she’d picked up from a hole in the ground one night, not sure what she was doing down there, not ready to admit what she’d hoped to find, not wanting to leave without something to justify having made the journey. So they’d all come home with her, most of them bearing the local used bookstore’s outdoor bargain bin sticker. A fourth-hand Housekeeping paperback came with her to work the next day because it fit in her backpack. Five nights later, she finished it and stuck it in her bookshelf, balanced on top of her old high school copies of Sylvia Plath and Phenomenal Woman.
-
She’d hoped to find a way to say good-bye. Had wanted to say it for a long time now. She never got a chance to do it properly, not to the people who mattered. They all left, one way or another, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, sometimes disappearing before her eyes and sometimes going away without giving her a reason and sometimes –
Sometimes, they left before she could ask them why.
Sometimes, they left before she could tell them they had to go. Because the two of them couldn’t be around each other, not like this. Because she needed to stake him and she didn’t want to. She really didn’t, not when she knew how much it would hurt for him to not be there, and she knew he’d stopped and she couldn’t forgive him, not yet, maybe not ever, but he’d stopped and then he’d left and she still wanted to ask him why and she hadn’t been able to look into his eyes and tell him good-bye.
-
She dreamed of staking him, watching him turning into dust on the bathroom floor. She dreamed about them chasing each other through the old Sunnydale High that was proud and clean and rubble and ash at the same time. She saw him in the cemeteries, in the streets, out dancing; happy and wild and shouting and free.
She saw him broken, bloodied, battered, but not beaten. She reached out to touch him and her hands came away wet, but it wasn’t his blood and it wasn’t hers either. She reached out towards him, but he made it into the sunshine before she could save him and her hands came away covered in ash. She saw him looming over her, fangs out, eyes golden. She felt his fists on her body, his hands on her skin, heard ripping fabric and running water. When she woke up from those dreams, she curled up under the covers and held Mr. Gordo tight.
She dreamed about him holding her, cold and gentle, like moonlight on water. She woke thinking about his smile and his hands and the press of ice against the back of her neck on a hot, still night. She heard his voice, his laughter, in ways she couldn’t when she was awake, no matter how hard she tried, even on the days she tried to forget them.
They were bad dreams because she hated them and always wanted to wake up, and they were good dreams because she could see him clearly. Better than she could ever imagine or remember. She’d wake up with echoes: the feelings of pounding his body, punching his face, hitting him until he couldn’t get up, the snap of bones in her ear and the wet sound of dead flesh beneath her fists.
Bad dreams, and good dreams, and she didn’t want them to be nothing but bad dreams because she hated having them, and she didn’t want them to be good dreams because she got to see him. If she never – if he didn’t – wherever he was, if he was still around somewhere, he might come back and she’d see him again.
Or he might never return, and she’d never have the chance to say good-bye.
-
Beneath her hands, forms took shape: a squat pig that stood up on four little legs that found a home on her desk. A spoon rest for the kitchen counter. A pencil holder, coil-built, for Xander’s office. A bowl for keys to go by the front door. And, because she had just enough clay left over for something small and ten minutes left and she didn’t want to waste anything she had in front of her, an ashtray that wouldn’t go anywhere.
What would have been a vase if she hadn’t pressed too hard and made a big clay lump on the wheel where a vase should have been. But Nidia assured her it was fine. She could gather up the clay and start again, because the clay was still clay. She could make something else out of it.
So she added a little slip, got the wheel turning again, and managed a passable vase that she initialized and dated and put on the shelf to dry and fire and glaze, a vase with big flowers on its sides that eventually found its place in the living room.
Not everything came out as good as the vase, or even the pig. Her attempt at a ladle warped on the shelf, and after it was fired, it wouldn’t even have worked a spatula. And there wasn’t any way to smush it back into raw clay.
“It’s not a total loss,” Nidia told her. “You know about grog?”
“As in a sailor’s rations?”
Nidia laughed, then taught the class something new, again. Not at Buffy’s expense, but because Buffy had given her a reminder. And, because Buffy gave her that reminder, Buffy was the one who got to pulverize the bad pottery into grog.
Take the pieces out into the courtyard, sit on the concrete next to the kiln, and smash and smash and smash them all to powdery pottery molecules, a fine dust, that’d get added to new clay and help stabilize it. Make it stronger, keep it from cracking, make it better able to hold its shape in the kiln and get shaped by hands that were still figuring out how to mold raw material into something else.
Nidia told Buffy to use a rock or a brick.
After she’d checked that no one was watching, she’d gone with her hands. Smashing the pottery against the concrete or grinding it in between her palms. Later, she could wash off the dust underneath her fingernails with the clay that always stuck to her skin. Now, she crushed a tiny shard between her fingertips, let the dust fall to the ground and stared at it where it’d fallen, then gathered everything up into the coffee can before it could blow away.
-
Her walk to class took her through town, past churches and parks, an elementary school and apartment buildings and Sunnydale’s best Chinese restaurant right at the edge of campus. She took shortcuts through parking lots and cut her way behind and between buildings, keeping off the main sidewalks. The campus wasn’t completely deserted, but if she took the back routes, she didn’t have to feel like she was alone. She was just…sneaking.
The sky was always full and clear when she got there and struck through with stars when she left. The air went from light and dry and hot, to smooth and dry and warm, finally ready to be gentle after it got dark.
The cemeteries were usually quiet, the way they always were in summer. People didn’t like to die in Sunnydale in summer. Buffy was fine with that.
She sometimes took the extra long way to class and the really long way home. Even with the shortcuts, she could make it take a while – walking past the empty fields marked for construction of a new dorm and watching small birds land on tall grasses, making them bend over and sway gently, or taking a detour downtown to the late-night Mexican place and buying herself a burrito and a strawberry lemonade she’d eat on a bench under an orange-yellow streetlight, moving carefully to make sure whatever she was carrying home wouldn’t break.
-
Xander came over for dinner a couple times a week, and Buffy let herself splurge by going to the farmers’ market to buy fancy eggplants and mushrooms. She learned her classmates’ names and had them down by the second try. Giles called his Sunday evenings, her Sunday mornings, for about an hour, talking about whatever came to mind. Sometimes Willow said hello, and sometimes she said hello to Buffy herself.
Dawn kept busy with a summer reading list, a standard set of books every incoming Sunnydale High tenth grader needed to read before the bell rang in September, and training, mornings and some afternoons and a few evenings too. Buffy didn’t push her harder than she thought she could handle. Try to get under fifteen minutes for a mile, then twelve, then ten. Three good pushups, then three sets of three, then three sets of five. Hands around the sword to figure out how to best swing it, hands up to catch a stake and immediately drive it home.
Dawn spent afternoons biking or walking around, sometimes going to cheap movies and once coming into Hibbert.
“Can I help you with anything?” Buffy asked, putting away a thirdhand copy of The Dharma Bums.
“Just browsing,” Dawn said, smiling, and Buffy let herself smile back. Just a bit. Just enough to feel a little lighter, and to be proud of Dawn for not asking if there was a friends and family discount when she bought a single lightbulb. Which she did with exact change. Because Buffy might be a serious employee selling Dawn something she needed, but Dawn always knew how to tease Buffy by following the letter of the law.
When Dawn left, Buffy went back to Ray and Japhy running down Mount Tamalpais to get to their baths and Hershey bars. There were notes in the margins about who was who and what was where, all of them in a left-handed scrawl that made her feel like she was reading the book for the second time, but on her first time through.
-
She went to work, and she went to class. She cooked and did laundry and didn’t watch much TV. She even went swimming a couple of times, biking out to the big rec center and buying a day pass and splashing around in the water, always being careful with her sunscreen. She went to the library and chatted with the librarians about what to read next, and she bought groceries at the Co-Op and asked the staff about the difference between crushed and diced tomatoes. When the Fourth came around, she and Dawn took blankets out to the park and watched the fireworks with everyone else, including the vampire she staked behind the public bathrooms.
It was the first vampire she’d seen in weeks – a few wights, sure. A couple of ghouls that turned corporeal long enough to take them out. A demon fight at Willy’s she broke up one Friday night that nearly chipped the big serving plate painted up with fish she’d give to Willow when she got back. But no vamps. She hadn’t thought about why, and she didn’t care.
The sound of air rushing in where the body’d been, the smell of living ash, wasn’t something she’d let herself forget. She couldn’t. She knew that sound deep in her bones, down to her soul. It wasn’t a comforting sound, or a pleasant one. Usually, though, it was a good one, because it meant she’d just dusted a vampire. Usually. Often.
But not always.
-
Buffy looked around the second floor of Hibbert Lumber. The wooden floors, the houseplants on the tall tables, the white wicker chairs. She knew where everything was supposed to be. The gardening supplies were in the back. She wasn’t wearing her work apron. Spike was sitting in one of the chairs, leaning forward. He cocked his head when he saw her.
“Is this the right place for you?” Buffy asked.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked, like Rebecca made sure she knew how to do.
“Not right now.”
“I wanted to say good-bye to you,” she said. “Before you left. I wanted to ask why.”
“The day’s coming,” he said. “Can’t say when. Just that it’s on its way.”
He looked at her so tenderly, so lovingly. She looked away, ashamed, and walked down to the main floor. She stepped behind the counter, put her hands on the cash register, then realized she’d wanted to tell Spike good-bye and hadn’t said the words. She knew she’d come from the second floor, but she couldn’t find the stairs.
“Looking in the wrong place, love.” He was right behind her.
“Where should I start?” She turned around, eyes on the ceiling.
“Try going down below.”
Buffy stepped around him, looking down at the solid floor. “There’s nowhere to go down from here.”
“Give it time. It’ll be around soon enough.”
She walked out into the parking lot. It wasn’t overcast; there just wasn’t any sun to cast any shadows. She looked up and saw a magpie on the oak tree by the sidewalk, its yellow bill bright, its tail sleek and beautiful. It looked at her, tilting its head, then flew off into a suddenly blue sky. She stepped out into the street to follow it but lost it against the sky and the trees.
“Looks like it knows the way home,” she said.
“Not yet,” Spike said from behind her. “It’s gotta find home first. Then it’ll know the way.”
Buffy turned to look at him and blinked. His face was hard with pain, and his hair was all wrong, all –
Her alarm, set for 7:15 a.m. six days a week, jolted her up, beeping and ringing and sounding like the alarm it was. She rolled over and switched it off, not bothering to hit snooze. There was breakfast to make, and today she’d strip the beds and wash the sheets, and there wasn’t any point in sleeping through that.
On her way to work, she biked along the most direct route, using all proper hand signals and obeying all traffic laws. She went through the day like normal, eating lunch before selling nuts and bolts, hammers and nails. Jane had brought lemon bars, and Buffy wrapped one up to take home to Dawn. She closed the till and said good night to everyone.
On her way home, she took a left where she usually went straight, biking through a neighborhood she didn’t go through much. There was a vacant, overgrown lot between houses that’d been empty since she was in high school and would probably stay empty for years to come. Some lots were like that. She biked past it and down another street, then another and another, speeding through red lights and moving to feel herself move.
Then she stopped right by a park. The trees were yellowing, as summer wore on. The grass was still green because people kept watering it, but the leaves were already going.
A magpie looked down at her from the nearest tree, cocking its head before taking flight, its yellow bill and white underwings a flash in front of her eyes before she lost it against the sky.
-
“Thank you,” Dawn said, somewhat confused.
“You’re welcome,” Buffy replied.
“It’s pretty,” Dawn admitted.
“I’m glad you like it.”
“I mean – It’s not very big,” Dawn pushed, gently.
“That’s because it’s exactly the right size for all the coffee you need to drink right now.” It was small, as mugs went. Buffy had cast a couple of big ones, painting one red and one black, but this one she’d deliberately made small so Dawn’s hands could wrap around it easily. She’d made the handle separately, refining its curve, and attached it gently, knowing it’d survive the firing process, hoping the grog she’d made would do its job. It did, and it took to paint beautifully, too. Well. Beautifully enough. It wasn’t a uniform green – there were a couple thick streaks that were almost blue, and a few spots that were thin enough the light brown clay beneath came through. But it was all colors Dawn loved, and it fit her hands perfectly.
To make her point, she poured Dawn just enough coffee to fill it, leaving a tiny bit of room for milk and sugar.
“Okay.” Dawn smiled as she drank. “It’s very nice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Buffy let herself feel proud. “I’m thinking…This went well enough, I might take intermediate ceramics next summer.”
“Always good to think ahead. So, can I come on patrol tonight?”
“Tonight?”
Dawn blinked innocently as she sipped.
Buffy sighed, and shook her head, smiling back at her sister.
“Soon,” she allowed. “You can come patrol with me soon. I’ll think about it. If you do well in training today and listen to everything I tell you.”
“Soon works,” Dawn said. “It’ll be the last big thing to do before school starts.”
“Oh, boy,” Buffy breathed, “don’t need to remind me.”